African Agriculture and Food Systems
It began, as many revolutions do, with something ordinary. Praxeda Melkior, co-founder of Migeto Farm in Kilosa district, had planted lemongrass — mchai chai — between her banana plants for the most practical of reasons: to keep pests away, to discourage snakes from settling near the homestead, and to sell a little on the side […]
By Charles Mwangi Tanzania achieved food self-sufficiency in 2025. It is a milestone worth celebrating — the country now produces enough food to feed its population and is targeting a 150 percent self-sufficiency ratio by 2030 to enable exports. Public investment in agriculture has quadrupled in four years, from TZS 294 billion in 2021/22 to […]
By Kilimokwanza Somewhere in a research station in Tanzania, a plant breeder is looking at rows of amaranth. Each row is a slightly different genetic line, tested across two locations for vegetable yield, seed yield, disease resistance, and performance under the increasingly unpredictable conditions that climate change is delivering to northern Tanzania. Twenty-three such breeding […]
A new partnership between an aviation company and a crop protection body signals Kenya’s serious pivot toward precision farming — and raises the question of whether the sky is now the limit for agricultural transformation. By Kilimokwanza.org CORRESPONDENT | Nairobi, 15 April 2026 When a Kenya Airways subsidiary walks into a room with a pesticide […]
By Kilimokwanza Every tomato that rots in a crate before it reaches a market stall is a double loss. It is income that a farmer will not receive, and it is nutrition that a household will not eat. In northern Tanzania, these double losses are happening at a scale that quietly undermines the food system’s […]
By Kilimokwanza There is a persistent assumption in agricultural development circles that reducing chemical inputs means accepting lower yields. It is an assumption rooted in a version of farming history that treats the Green Revolution’s chemical intensification model as the only path to productivity. A new brief from the CGIAR Science Program on Better Diets […]
By Kilimokwanza There is a tendency, when discussing poor nutrition in Africa, to frame the problem as one of individual choice: people eat badly because they do not know better, or because they lack the discipline to eat well. The research does not entirely support this view. A research brief from the CGIAR Science Program […]
By Kilimokwanza Thirty-five grams. That is roughly a quarter of a small mango. Half an orange. Two modest slices of papaya. It is the average amount of fruit consumed daily by women of reproductive age in the Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions, according to a new research brief from the CGIAR Science Program on Better Diets […]
By Kilimokwanza Tanzania has a mobile money success story that much of the world envies. Seven in ten adults use mobile money services. Financial access points now sit within five kilometres of 86 percent of the population. The infrastructure, by any measure, is impressive. And yet, something is not adding up — quite literally. Agriculture […]
There is a story we tell ourselves about hunger and body weight in Africa, and it goes roughly like this: poverty causes undernutrition, and wealth brings better diets. It is a tidy narrative, and like many tidy narratives, the evidence is beginning to complicate it considerably. A new CGIAR research brief, titled Diets and Nutrition […]